Cody Rhodes is the son of WWE Hall of Famer Dusty Rhodes, and for most of his career that was the headline. It isn't anymore. He spent the back half of the 2010s walking away from the biggest company in the business, betting on himself on the independent scene, and helping build a rival promotion out of nothing. Then he came back to finish what his father never could.
Cody broke in as a second-generation talent and spent years as a solid hand who never quite cracked the top tier. In 2016 he did the thing nobody with a guaranteed paycheck does — he asked to leave. On the independents and in New Japan he reinvented himself, wrote his own name in lights without the machine behind him, and in 2019 became one of the founding faces and an executive of All Elite Wrestling. For a stretch he was the most important non-WWE wrestler in America.
He returned to WWE at WrestleMania 38 in 2022 and immediately called his shot: win the world title that always eluded Dusty. It took two tries. After coming up short in 2023, Cody beat Roman Reigns in the main event of WrestleMania 40 in April 2024 to win the Undisputed WWE Championship — ending Reigns’ reign of more than 1,300 days and putting a world title in the Rhodes family for the first time. "Finishing the story" stopped being a catchphrase and became fact.
Since finishing the story, Cody has been WWE’s top babyface and the guy the company builds its biggest shows around. Whatever belt he is or isn’t holding at any given moment, he’s the centerpiece — which is exactly why his standing in The Index is worth watching. When the top guy moves, everything below him moves too.